The pervasive use of computing in everyday aspects of life, and particularly business activities, has led to a massive increase in computer messages transmitted every moment of every day. These electronic messages are processed by systems, some of which were never designed to efficiently receive and process such a glut of electronic messages. In particular, some systems receive and process electronic messages of such importance that internal electronic message lost must be kept to a minimum, often approaching zero.
A subset of systems that have near zero fault tolerance levels is financial trading platforms, sometimes referred to as electronic trading systems. These systems receive, process, and transmit messages related to quotes and orders for financial products, such as: securities, futures, options, and bonds. Examples of these systems are used by exchanges, such as: Chicago Board Options Exchange, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ.
While these systems have greatly improved access to the world's financial markets, they are subject to potential weaknesses. For example, messages transmitted to and processed by financial trading platforms are subject to both geographic and processing latency. Latency is generally the time it takes, after a message has been transmitted, for the message to be received and processed by a system. For example, if a message is sent to system and is processed one second later, the latency for the message is one second. Geographic latency is latency incurred by the message because of physical distance between the location of system sending and location of the system processing the sent message. Processing latency is latency incurred within a system after the message to be processed has been received and before processing has been completed. While geographic latency is, too a great degree, determined by the physics of communication mediums, such as the speed of light within fiber optic cable, processing latency can be improved through the use of efficient computer architecture.
Another weakness of low fault tolerance systems, sometimes referred to as mission critical systems, is failure of the primary system and the time and data loss associated with bringing online a secondary backup system. A system having this secondary backup system can be referred to as a high availability system. Two primary weaknesses associated with failing over to a secondary system are: the time the system is unavailable to receive and process electronic messages, and any data that is lost by the system during the failover to the high availability system.
Because low fault tolerance systems, such as electronic trading platforms, are only increasing in complexity and use, new advancements in low latency and high availability computer architectures within these systems is in need.